Passengers aboard an Air Canada Express flight faced a tense landing at Halifax Stanfield International Airport on Saturday night when their aircraft suffered from a suspected landing gear issue. Fortunately, all 73 people on board disembarked safely with no reported injuries, the airline confirmed.
The incident involved Flight AC2259, which had departed from St. John’s, Newfoundland. Upon arrival in Halifax, the plane could not taxi to the terminal, forcing passengers to be transported by bus, according to Air Canada spokesperson Peter Fitzpatrick. The flight was operated by Air Canada partner PAL Airlines using a De Havilland DHC-8-402 aircraft.
Upon landing, the plane skidded a “decent” distance down the runway, the Transportation Safety Board of Canada disclosed. Passenger Nikki Valentine described the frightening chain of events, telling CNN’s newsgathering partner CBC, “The plane shook quite a bit and we started seeing fire on the left side of the plane and smoke started coming in the windows.”
Although the PAL Airlines incident in Halifax ended without injury to any of the passengers or crew, it drew comparisons to a tragic event that also occurred this past weekend in South Korea. A Jeju Air flight crash-landed at Muan International Airport on Sunday morning, resulting in the deaths of 179 people. Officials and aviation experts have identified a landing gear malfunction as the likely cause of the accident in that case, also.
In Halifax, the airfield was closed for roughly 90 minutes, after which one of its pair of runways was approved to continue flight operations. Tiffany Chase, spokesperson for the Halifax International Airport Authority, said in a statement, “Four flights were diverted and there were a handful of cancellations and delays while the airfield was closed."
Air Canada released a statement acknowledging the unnerving nature of the experience for passengers, saying, “We appreciated this incident was unsettling for customers and we remain available to assist them.”
The Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) announced on Sunday that it was launching a probe into this incident, dispatching a team of investigators to the airport. The aircraft remains stuck on the runway until the TSB concludes its examination.
At this stage, the root cause of the landing gear issue remains unknown. The airline stated, “Out of respect for the investigative process we cannot speculate and have no additional information to provide at this time.”
This latest accident also echoes other aviation safety breaches that have occurred this holiday season, including an incident on Christmas Eve in which a body was found in a wheel well of a United Airlines flight traveling from Chicago to Maui. On the same day, a stowaway was discovered aboard a Delta Air Lines flight bound for Honolulu, which resulted in the flight being delayed by two hours while passengers were deplaned and rescreened by TSA.
This latest incident involving a stowaway occurred only one month after another unticketed passenger, a 57-year-old Russian woman, managed to sneak through TSA to board a Delta flight from New York City's JFK Airport to Paris just ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday. In that circumstance, Delta launched an “exhaustive investigation of what may have occurred”, while the TSA prepares to bring a civil case against the trespasser.
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